Rethinking Basic Design in Architectural Education: Foundations Past and Future

by Mine Ozkar

Overview

Rethinking Basic Design in Architectural Education provides historical and computational insights into beginning design education for architecture. Inviting the readers to briefly forget what is commonly known as basic design, it delivers the account of two educators, Denman W. Ross and Arthur W. Dow, from the turn of the twentieth century in Northeast America, interpreting key aspects of their methodology for teaching foundations for design and art. This alternate intellectual context for the origins of basic design as a precursor to computational design complements the more haptic, more customized, and more open-source design and fabrication technologies today.

Basic design described and illustrated here as a form of low-tech computation offers a setting for the beginning designer to consciously experience what it means to design. Individualized dealings with materials, tools, and analytical techniques foster skills and attitudes relevant to creative and technologically adept designers. The book is a timely contribution to the theory and methods of beginning design education when fast-changing design and production technology demands change in architecture schools’ foundations curricula.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138825420
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/10/2017
Series:	Routledge Research in Architecture
Pages:	166
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mine Özkar is Professor of Architecture at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. Collaborating with design professionals, computer scientists, and art historians, her research focuses on visual, spatial, and material aspects of design computation, and their integration to foundational design education. She holds a PhD in design and computation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Part I: Early Beginnings, 1. Seeing Design in Art: The Vision of Denman Waldo Ross, 2. Abstract Forms and Form Relations: The Vision of Arthur Wesley Dow, 3. The Psychology for Basic Design in the late 19^th century, Part II: Looking to the Future, 4. The Disillusioning Pasts of Basic Design, 5. Computational Design Foundations, 6. Conclusion: Pragmatics of a Foundational Design Studio